Steven Le Roux wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:33:56 +1200, "Robin Paulson" <robin.paulson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>On 19/09/2007, OJW <openmoko at blibbleblobble.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>>On Tuesday 18 September 2007 19:12, Ian Stirling wrote:
>>>>>>>It must have wi-max, and be able to fly up to several kilometers, to
>>>>take pictures for use with the OM mapping system.
>>>>>>Need to integrate with these guys...
>>>>>>http://diydrones.com/>>>>>>[phone with GPS and camera being used to fly a model aircraft, and send
>>>georeferenced photos back over the network]
>>>>interesting stuff
>>>>this has got me thinking - openstreetmap is progressing as a nice
>>alternative to google maps and so on, but is there an open-source
>>equivalent for the photography part of google maps/earth? something
>> Yes there is, I beleive a friend shew me that in the osm editor (josm)
It's not really.
That's almost certainly the landsat/yahoo imagery plugin.
The problem is the data.
The imagery that would be gotten from a model aircraft style UAV is
likely to be on the order of .1m/pixel.
One UAV flying at 30m/s mapping a 100m swath gets around a gigabyte of
compressed data over an area of 10 square kilometers.
At this resolution, a small country - the netherlands, for example,
can be mapped in 4000 hours, yielding 4Tb of data.
For larger countries, this is much, much worse.
USA, for example is 10 million km^2 or so, and needs 1000Tb.
Ok - this is maybe $1M or so in drives and boxes to stick them in, which
might be raised somehow.
The bandwidth bills is what will kill you.